How Unix politics are killing OS innovation

It’s frustrating. Each time I think I’ve found a viable long-term replacement for my Windows development and testing environment, along comes some stumbling block to trip me up. And while these hurdles are mostly technical, the “root” causes (pun intended) are almost always political in nature.

Case in point: My various bouts with the disease known as “Ubuntu-itis.” Every six months or so I get the urge to jump ship and join with the great hippie masses swaying to the open source beat. But then “the man” has to come and spoil the fun. All that finger pointing about the ACPI bug — nVidia pointing to the kernel team pointing back at nVidia, with me pointing at Canonical for failing to sort the whole mess out. It’s like trying to decipher that Battlestar Galactica “Last Supper” picture: Everyone’s got a knife out for someone else (FYI, I’m leaning towards the doe-eyed Dualla as the final Cylon).

This week it’s OpenSolaris, the new kid on the FOSS block that may not be quite as “open” as Sun would like us to believe. That’s because, despite public statements to the contrary, Sun may not “own” the Unix IP in the way that most of us think of ownership. In fact, it’s looking more and more like the only true IP holder is Novell, the same company that just got done grinding SCO’s bones to make its bread. If they get hungry, might they turn on Sun? How much damage could Novell inflict if Sun decides to go ahead with a GPL-3 license for OpenSolaris and the folks from Provo object? More importantly, would you feel comfortable adopting an OS platform that may get litigated out of existence before its first birthday?

It’s a shame because I actually like OpenSolaris. The 2008.5 release is polished, easy to install/configure and seems chock full of promise. During my own preliminary testing, the Gnome-based UI had me feeling right at home, though re-inventing the package manager wheel seemed a waste. Most of my devices were supported (I tested on a Dell OptiPlex 745 instead of my usual XPS notebook), including such esoteric stuff as the bay-mounted 12-in-1 memory card reader (Memory Stick Pro Duo support — yeah!). Even VirtualBox seemed to work correctly, which isn’t surprising since Sun now owns the code base.

Overall, it was far more pleasant experience than my various PC-BSD misadventures. I got the sense that Sun actually knows what they’re doing with Unix, which makes the thought of Novell stomping this nascent Linux challenger into oblivion that much more disturbing. Here’s hoping that OpenSolaris survives and serves to keep the increasingly insular Linux community — including the “hear no evil, see no evil” crowd that controls the kernel — honest.